FAQs

Q: What are my options for refinishing our case goods and public area furniture?

You basically have three options:
1. Continue to handle it with your engineering staff or with the last touch up vendor you called and deal with the headaches resulting from a short term solution.
2. Replace some or all of the pieces of furniture. If that is not realistic given your budget…
3. Call us! We look forward to hearing from you! If you want to ask questions that are not answered in the FAQs below, email us by clicking on the “Contact Us” link on this page, or call us at 757-617-4459.

Q: How much does your refinishing cost, and are there any other costs?

Our base price to do our Standard Refinishing is $125 per room. This would include the usual pieces:

Dresser/entertainment unit

Writing desk

Nightstands

Headboards

Bathroom vanity base

Usually one other piece like a side table or luggage stand.

Our Standard Refinishing includes blending all the scratches throughout the room to match the existing finish, AND we apply our Full Refinishing techniques on all the high-wear edges, which usually include: front of writing desk and legs, top front edges on dressers and nightstands, lower trim on dresser where vacuuming has badly scuffed it, the front edge of the bathroom vanity, and the front edge on another piece like a side table.

For rooms or suites with more furniture, the pricing is adjusted upwards. On the average, a suite with 10 plus pieces of furniture is going to run between $165 on the low side to $225 on the high end.

And what is our Full Refinishing? In rare cases, owners have decided that the entire room of case goods is looking a bit dull. Not just scratched up and worn in the usual places, but dull overall. In these cases, we have employed our Full Refinishing process. This includes prepping and refinishing every surface of all the case goods, even those places like the sides of dressers or desk sides that are rarely seen or the interior shelf space below the nightstand drawer, removing all hardware from all drawers and cabinet doors in order to refinish all these surfaces, even if there are no scratches on them, and then replacing the hardware. This thorough and complete refinishing of every surface is significantly more time consuming than our Standard Refinishing, and as a result the base price for our Full Refinishing is $225 per room.

There are also costs that we pass on to our clients for travel and shipping of supplies. For an average hotel anywhere in the continental United States, the total cost for this is about $1,500. Or to look at it another way: it adds about $10/room to the cost of refinishing the case goods in a 150-room hotel.

There are other optional costs that are sometimes chosen by our clients. Perhaps the main one is that often there is a need to freshen the look of a room by removing all the old handles and installing new handles. CGR charges $5 per handle for the labor to do this. The handles are provided by our clients.

For a more detailed answer about your particular situation, email us by clicking on the “Contact Us” link on this page, or call us at 757-617-4459. We look forward to hearing from you!

Q: Why don’t stain pens, stains, and one-step polys that other vendors and engineers have used last?

Let’s first address stain pens. Stain pens have their use. We use stain pens as well. But here’s the problem: they have virtually no bonding capability. On their own, they can temporarily color a scratch, but that color will soon be wiped away. This is even worse on high-wear edges like the front edge of the writing desk and nightstands, where housekeeping wipes and cleans every day. On these surfaces it is inevitable that the simple act of cleaning is going to wipe away the color put on by stain pens.

Some hotels, trying to cover up the bad scratches, allow vendors or engineers to wipe on a stain that covers and darkens the worn areas. This “solution,” though, is even worse than stain pens, because the pigments in stains are meant to be applied to raw wood. Since finished furniture is sealed, the pigments just lie on the surface and can be wiped off. The result of applying stains to furniture is usually not even an improvement in the overall look of the piece. To be sure, the scratches are covered, but now you have furniture covered in dark splotches of mis-matched stain color.

So how about those one-step polys? The one advantage the polys have over the stain pens and stain is that they have some bonding capability. Unfortunately, the down side is that the one-step polys are more transparent than opaque, so they don’t hide the scratches, and they don’t wear very well in the high-use environment of a hotel room. They are also brittle, so that within a few months you are already seeing flaking and peeling. This highlights the main problem with poly application: the surfaces need to be meticulously prepared for adhesion. Not only does no one do this adequately, but even if the surface was properly prepared, the transparency of the product means you are not getting the coverage necessary to hide the damage.

For all of these reasons, that’s why you need the Case Goods Refinishing solution. Our process of surface prep, layered color applications sealed with layers of clear coat, which we developed through years of testing, this process guarantees a finish that will restore your wood furniture to truly like-new condition with a finish that will last for years and years.

We look forward to hearing from you! Email us by clicking on the “Contact Us” link on this page. If you want to ask more detailed questions about your particular situation and the timing of the project, please call us at 757-617-4459.

Q: What is the down time for a room? Will we lose inventory of rooms for guest use?

Guest rooms are released back into hotel inventory within two hours from the moment we apply our final coat. All the rooms we work on in a given day are returned to inventory the same day. The processes that we’ve developed over the years, including daily accounting of progress and dynamic feedback to local management, has enabled us to develop a refinishing process that works seamlessly in even a busy hotel. If you have more questions about how this works, call us at 757-617-4459, or email us by clicking on the “Contact Us” button on this page. We look forward to serving you!

Q: How many rooms per day can you refinish?

Typically, we refinish between 10 and 20 rooms per day. We could, in theory, complete more, but practical considerations based on occupancy rates means that we usually are completing 10 to 20 per day.

The processes that we’ve developed over the years, including daily accounting of progress and dynamic feedback to local management, has enabled us to develop a refinishing process that works seamlessly in even a busy hotel. If you have more questions about how this works, call us at 757-617-4459, or email us by clicking on the “Contact Us” button on this page. We look forward to serving you!

Q: Will the smell of harsh or toxic chemicals remain in the room?

No. CGR uses environmentally friendly coatings. Our coloring coats and clear coats are Greenguard certified for indoor air quality, with very low VOCs. There will be no lingering chemical smell in the room when we release it for use.

There are times, with some public area projects, in order to keep even the slight smell produced during our prep phase, that we employ the use of air purifying machines to knock chemical smells out of the air. This is a very rare occurrence. If you have any questions about this, we would like to answer you in detail; call us at 757-617-4459, or email us with your questions by clicking on the “Contact Us” button on this page. We look forward to serving you!

Q: Does CGR do custom cabinet work or other woodworking?

No, CGR does not do custom cabinet work or other woodworking. We have developed a core business of refinishing your case goods and public area wood furniture. This is what we do better and faster and in a more cost-effective way than anyone in the industry. For custom woodwork we suggest you contact a local artisan.

Q: Is CGR a franchise? How do you make sure your quality is uniform?

We are not a franchise. We have always placed a premium on thorough and quality training. We do not release a technician into the field until he has gone through many months of hands on training with an experienced technician. The quality we deliver in Washington DC is the same as what do in Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida or California. From coast to coast we deliver the same quality time and time again, guaranteed.

To get started on the path to solving your case goods and furniture problems, click on the “Contact Us” button on this page. We look forward to serving you!

Q: You say your work is guaranteed. What does that mean?

Here is what our guarantee means: Once you have signed our Work Order and we have scheduled a date for service, our crew will show up and complete one day’s worth of work. At the end of that day, you or your representative will inspect our work and determine if you are pleased with our quality—that we are in fact delivering what we promised. In the unlikely event you are not pleased (it’s never happened), we will pack up and return home and not charge you anything.

We are willing to take this risk because we are sure you will experience what every single client we’ve ever had has experienced: the long-lasting quality and beauty of our refinishing. Contact us now for guaranteed, lasting results by clicking on the “Contact Us” button, or call us at 757-617-4459.

Q: How does the process work, once we decide to use CGR for our refinishing needs?

Once you have approved the analysis and proposal we’ve sent you:

We will send you a Work Order with the specific details of the level of refinishing you have chosen. This will be signed and returned to us. If you are a first-time client, our office will at this time send you all relevant admin information like a W-9 and COI.

We will then schedule a time for our refinishing service. Because keeping rooms in inventory and accommodating to your occupancy needs is of top priority, this means enough advance planning for your local management to block off rooms ahead of time. This ensures that we are given the daily minimum number of rooms in order for us to hit the production goals you and we have set so that the project will be completed within a defined time frame. And every room we work on in a given day is returned to inventory that same day.

While each situation is somewhat unique, we have worked with every type of hotel, even high-occupancy hotels, to develop a process that is smooth and allows for you to serve your guests and meet your goals. Before we begin any project, we will go over this process with you and the relevant staff that will be interacting with our technicians on a daily basis.

On our first day on site we will meet with all relevant managers and review the production plan for the project. At this time we will receive from local managers a list of all the room numbers in the hotel. If this can be given to us in a convenient digital form, this is best. If not, our lead tech will create a spreadsheet of all the rooms. This spreadsheet is used to keep a daily record of the completed rooms and is emailed to local management at the end of every day.

This is a critical step! It is vitally important that everyone on staff who has the ability to book rooms for guests is aware of the rooms that have been refinished. As the project progresses, it is critical for guests to be booked first into refinished rooms, making sure that the rooms blocked off for refinishing every day are, in fact, rooms that have not been refinished. Provision should also be made so that guests using e-check-in systems are not able to reserve rooms that are scheduled for refinishing. These safeguards to production are to make sure that our technicians are working a full day and getting the project done for you on time.

This is also why, on our Work Order, we have laid out a daily minimum number of rooms you need to provide for us. If this minimum is not given, there is a per room penalty—35% the cost of refinishing that room—for every room below the minimum that is not given us for production. We rarely have to use this, but it is there as a reminder that our time, like yours, is valuable, and we must keep our technicians working full days when they are on the road.

The reason we are able to charge such a low price for the quality we deliver is because we’ve figured out how to keep our production process moving in the pressured environment of getting rooms back into inventory.

Work begins! Here’s how we usually work in a high-occupancy hotel to make sure that rooms are available for guests on the same day:

Let’s say we need ten rooms per day to meet our production goals. We will start with five of those rooms first thing in the morning and work them together. We need to work rooms together that are in close proximity to each other, so that after our technician applies one of our coats in a room, he can move on to the next room to apply the next coat, and so on through all five rooms. By the time he is finished with applying a coat in the 5th room, the coat in the first room has dried and cured enough to allow him to return to that first room, and then repeat the process all over again. In this way, we are able to “touch” each piece of furniture between 6 and 10 times, and finish those first five rooms by about 1pm, enabling them to be used for guests by check-in time of 3pm. At 1pm we start on the next five rooms, completing them by 6 or 7pm, which would make them available for late check-ins.

By coordinating closely with local management, we are able to ensure that the project gets done in the agreed-upon time frame, with no down time for either us or the hotel. Even in high-occupancy hotels, this blocking off of rooms will usually not affect the flow of business.

On the first day, to ensure that our work is 100% to your satisfaction, the relevant onsite manager will inspect our work to make sure it is all that we have promised it would be. Our guarantee is that you will be 100% satisfied, or we will stop production and you will not be charged a penny. We are confident in our guarantee: we’ve never had a dissatisfied client. But this step is in place to make sure that this record remains unbroken.

At the end of the day, our lead technician onsite will send to the relevant local managers an updated spreadsheet that includes marking all the rooms completed that day, along with an updated count of all rooms completed and rooms remaining to be refinished.

On projects where we are working on public area or restaurant furniture, the daily report will include an inventory of what has been completed that day, such as tables or chairs refinished, elevator carts refinished, etc.

Project wrap up. It is usually the case that the best-laid plans get slightly altered, like, for example, a guest that unexpectedly extends a visit. But if the production plan has been kept, these minor changes are easily absorbed into the work flow, so that at the end of the project time line all the work has been able to be completed. Our lead technician will have a final meeting with the local manager. Following this meeting, usually in the next day or so, our clients will be sent an evaluation form by email. We hope for a nice comment or two, and any suggestions that might make our service to the hospitality industry more complete.

“Case Goods Refinishing took case goods that were 7 years old and gave us a new lease on their life.”